On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 16:56, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> I want to believe your theory (since I also have a feeling that some
> wiki pages feel less trustworthy than others) but my own use of
> Wikipedia makes me skeptical that this is all there is -- on many
> pages on important topics you can clearly tell that a lot of effort
> went into the article, and then I trust it more. On other places you
> can tell that almost nobody cared. But I never look at the names of
> the authors.
Right -- I feel like wiki quality varies with the amount of attention
spent on maintaining it. Wikis that get a lot of maintenance (or have
someone devoted to "wiki gardening") will be good (consistent and up
to date), while wikis that are only occasionally updated, or updated
without much consistency or added to without editing get to feel bad.
Seems like a variation of the broken window theory.
So what we really need is a way to make editing the developer docs
more rewarding (or less hard) for potential authors (i.e. python
committers). If putting it in a proper VCS so they can use their
editor of choice would help that, that seems like a good solution.
Cheers,
Dirkjan